Masterclass with Prof. Mandy Rose: Virtual Reality and the Immersive Turn

In this masterclass, we will critically analyze immersive technologies through, amongst others, media, postcolonial, and gender studies lenses, reflecting on their ethical implications. We will also explore the potential of decolonial storytelling to enable new ways of engaging with social realities (Rose 2018). Prof. Rose will explore the challenges and potentials for social critique and new forms of knowledge as documentary makers engage with immersive Virtual Reality.

Immersive technologies call for new approaches in researching media. Rather than focusing solely on representation, scholars like Mandy Rose (2018) highlight the need to explore embodiment and presence in immersive media. Immersive technologies, such as VR, might offer the potential to engage embodied and affective knowledge. Rose therefore describes VR as “technologies of corporality”. Such technologies envelop us in a more complete and corporeal matter, requiring a shift from focusing mainly on representation towards asking questions of embodiment. This demands the development of “[…] methods that can unpack the meaning of these experiences along with the creation of a shared critical vocabulary that addresses the ramifications, potentials and pitfalls of these embodied practices” (Rose 2018, 11).

When: 15 May 2025, Welcome 9am, Masterclass from 9:30h-12:30h
Where: Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 15A, Room 204
ECTS: 2 EC, see details below.
Coordinator: Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi (UU)
For:  RMA students and PhD candidates in media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, postcolonial/decolonial studies, literature studies, film studies, media and communications studies, etc., who are a member of RMeS, NOG or any another Dutch Graduate Research School (onderzoekschool).
Registration for Masterclass: via THIS LINK. Please register before May 1, 2025

Literature

  • Rose, Mandy. 2018. “Technologies of Seeing and Technologies of Corporeality: Currents in Nonfiction Virtual Reality.”

Programme Masterclass

15 May 2025, Welcome 9am, Masterclass from 9:30h-12:30h
Lunch break: 12:30-13:30, Kromme Nieuwegracht 80 (room 0.03 Foyer Theaterzaal)
VR Screening: 13:30-16:00h.Utrecht University, Munstraat 2A, Room 1.11

All I know about Teacher Li

“The world is on fire, innocent people are dying, and governments are lying to our faces. We need revolution now, but how? All I Know About Teacher Li is my attempt to capture the numbing despair of our times, the sinking feeling of waking up every day to an onslaught of normalised tragedies. But it’s also a true story about hope. This experience invites you to witness how Teacher Li’s relentless small act of sharing bad news on Twitter snowballs into a force for global activism. I made this piece to remind myself, and anyone feeling powerless watching the world burn, that our daily actions carry immense force for change. All revolutions begin small.” (Creator’s statement, Venice Immersive 2024)

During the class we will consider the limitations and potentials of VR to reframe power dynamics and its implications for storytelling otherwise. The students will experience the VR work, All I know about Teacher Li, by artist Zhuzmo. The students will reflect on this VR engagement in relation to the discussions touched on during the masterclass. After, students are expected to write about their experience of this VR in the form of an essay, supported by literature.

Next to the masterclass Mandy Rose will offer a public lecture open to all colleagues and experts in the field. This will happen after the masterclass and the VR screenings at the end of the day: predicted time 17.15-18.45 on May 15, 2025

The masterclass is open to all postgraduate students (MA, RMA, PhD) studying at a university in the Netherlands. Participating RMA & PhD students can earn a total of two credits (2 ECS): for attendance and active participation in the masterclass, and for writing a short paper/self-reflection (ca. 1,500–2,000 words), in response to the VR introduced during the masterclass and topics discussed with Prof. Mandy Rose connecting to the recommended critical readings.

Instructors Involved

Prof. Mandy Rose, Professor of Documentary ＆ Digital Cultures (UWE Bristol)
Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi, Professor Media, Gender and Postcolonial studies (UU)
Lisa Burghardt, PhD candidate (UU)
Laurence Herfs, PhD candidate (UU)

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Public Lecture with with Mandy Rose (UWE, Bristol UK):
Virtual Realities: Documentary’s Immersive Turn

Focusing on immersive media, and the unexpected take-up of Virtual Reality (VR) for nonfiction in the last decade, this lecture considers issues arising for documentary as producers engage the platforms, technologies and types of audience experience enabled by digital. Through case studies of award-winning nonfiction works, I’ll discuss the epistemological ramifications of the frameless media experience of VR and the feelings of embodiment and what’s known as presence which are regarded as VR’s defining characteristics. I’ll discuss tensions between the affordances of immersion and the work of social critique that has been central to documentary’s mission. In these VR projects audiences become immersants – with touch, walking, vibration, even smell and heat becoming part of media experience. I’ll consider these multisensory registers being introduced into VR experiences as an alternative to the visuality that has dominated media since its inception. Might the tactile epistemologies of VR offer an alternative to what Donna Haraway has called the “God trick” of seeing everything from nowhere? Might multisensory registers encourage an attitude that Michael Taussig has called “yielding knowing” in relation to our fellow humans and the more-than-human, providing a new direction for documentary in our age of polycrisis?

Date & Time: May 15, 2025 | 17:15h-19:00h
Where: Utrecht University, Drift 25, Room 0.02

Registration for Public Lecture: via THIS LINK. Please register before May 1, 2025

Biography Mandy Rose

Mandy Rose is Professor of Documentary & Digital Cultures at UWE Bristol. Her research looks at immersive and interactive documentary – aesthetics, ethics, audiences, co-creative practices – and at the potential of documentary to contribute to post-carbon futures. She is collaborating with Research Fellow Tom Livingstone to explore multisensory storytelling as Co-Investigator on the UKRI Strength in Places My World programme. From 2017-2020 she was Co-Investigator on the EPSRC Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters project. Mandy brings a practitioner perspective to her research – she worked in the London Independent film sector in the 1980s, then as a producer/director in documentary and factual television. In the mid-nineties, she co-founded and series-produced the BBC 2’s ground-breaking Video Nation project (Prix Iris, CRE Race in the Media Award) and Executive Produced the Capture Wales/Cipolwg ar Gymru (BAFTA Cymru) digital storytelling project. Mandy is co-editor of i-docs: the evolving practices of interactive documentary – Wallflower Press 2017. Her recent writing appears in Studies in Documentary Film, Convergence and The Intellect Handbook of Documentary.

 

The conference is organized in collaboration with RMeS (Research School of Media Studies), NOG (Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies) and the NWO funded project VR as Empathy Machine: Media Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament carried out at Utrecht University and led by Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi.